Making Online Collaboration Safer at GitHub

Transcript

1. Making online collaboration safer at GitHub Danielle Leong Application Engineer Community & Safety, GitHub
2. @dmleong Community & Safety
3. Title Text
4. I help make online communities safer
5. What’s an online community?
7. Title Text
9. All people have the right to merge
12. Community & Safety builds the infrastructure for healthy online communities
14. Online harassment is destructive behavior that undermines productivity
15. Types of online harassment • Posting personal info (doxing) • Hate speech • Sexual or pornographic content • Impersonation • SWATing • Spam • Identity theft • Exclusionary behavior • Death and rape threats • Dog piling • Personal attacks • Threatening and inappropriate images • So many more
16. Microaggressions
17. Women are more likely to have their pull requests merged if they hide their gender* *Study is not yet peer-reviewed California Polytechnic State University North Carolina State University
18. Age, gender, and sexual orientation are overwhelming factors in online harassment
19. The further you are from being a straight, cis-gender, affluent, able-bodied white male, the more likely you are to be harassed
20. 25% of women 18-24 experience severe online sexual harassment Pew Research Center
21. Women receive twice as many death and rape threats than men The Guardian
22. 25% of LGBT* women suffer serious online harassment The Guardian
23. Who are these jerkfaces?
25. “These are mostly normal people who do things that seem fun at the time that have huge implications.” Whitney Phillips Mercer University This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture.
26. “I never felt bad. I found [your work] so vile that I thought you didn’t deserve sympathy.” Troll, TIME Magazine
28. “It’s not done to express an opinion, it’s done to scare you.” Leslie Jones Actress
29. Any time you have user-to-user interactions, there can be harassment.
30. Targets of harassment are chosen because they are visible
31. Women "holding prominent, visible positions in the open source community [are] targets of harassment". Jérôme Petazzoni
32. Notable examples of harassment • Organizing doxing using repositories and issues • Young open source developer targeted with porn and homophobic slurs • Racist repository names • Spamming people with ASCII genitalia
33. Common every day harassment • Spamming issues and repositories with comments • People not merging pull requests because the author is a minority • People getting spammed with threats that were immediately deleted • Sock puppet accounts that dog pile on a person’s pull request
35. Internal debate + lack of moderation tooling + no set definition of harassment = paralysis
36. Paralysis hurt our users
37. People were silenced and pushed off the platform
38. Harassment isn’t free speech because it silences others
39. Online harassment is destructive behavior that undermines productivity
40. Build tools that encourage good behavior, not policy to punish bad behavior
41. We are a core engineering team whose purpose aligns with the company’s values of positive social impact
42. Community & Safety is not a nice-to-have, it is mandatory
44. Build systems that empower inclusive and healthy communities and encourage good online citizenship. Discourage behavior that is destructive or threatens personal safety.
45. Give community managers the tools they need to succeed
46. Build explicit consent into every user-to-user interaction
47. Some things we’ve shipped
51. Community & Safety consults on feature reviews to catch potential abuse vectors
53. In the works
54. Repository reputation system
55. Tools to measure and encourage Code of Conduct adoption rates
56. Site-wide Community Guidelines that define harassment
57. Crisis management tools for community managers
58. Future vision
59. Communities on GitHub are safe and inclusive, composed of diverse users acting as model online citizens.
60. Model online citizens are not jerkfaces. They respect one another as people and contribute meaningful work.
61. Build enthusiastic and informed consent for every interaction
62. Reward good behavior
63. Curiosity and learning is encouraged without fear of ridicule
64. Community managers have the tools to de-escalate situations and foster inclusive culture
65. Concluding thoughts
66. Harassment happens any time you have user-to-user interaction
67. Build tools that align with company values
68. "Communities that purport to be for everyone have an obligation to cultivate a community of inclusive values...a space where participants aren't silenced by fear or shouted down.” Sarah Jeong The Internet of Garbage
70. Resources • https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/08/online- harassment-of-women-at-risk-of-becoming-established-norm-study • http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ • https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/08/online- harassment-of-women-at-risk-of-becoming-established-norm-study • http://time.com/4457110/internet-trolls/ • https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/?td=sd • The Internet of Garbage by Sarah Jeong • http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2416765/open-source-hostile-to- women-claims-docker-devops-guy
71. Thanks!